The shell game has begun. So is the damned narrative. If you get your news from the usual LSM outlets, you are probably thinking that the problem is all the evil republicans who want to protect their rich buddies from paying their “fair share”, whatever the fuck that bullshit arbitrary marxist lingo – and have no doubt that it is arbitrary on purpose, so they can redefine it in their favor whenever they feel they need to steal more money – is supposed to mean. The narrative is that the democrats are standing fast but working hard to get a compromise, and Politico is doing its best to carry the narrative. What’s the first issue? Them dumb republicans will have to cave to the donkeys and give us tax hikes.

Listen to top Democrats and Republicans talk on camera, and it sounds like they could not be further apart on a year-end tax-and-spending deal — a down payment on a $4 trillion grand bargain.

But behind the scenes, top officials who have been involved in the talks for many months say the contours of a deal — including the size of tax hikes and spending cuts it will most likely contain — are starting to take shape.

Cut through the fog, and here’s what to expect: Taxes will go up just shy of $1.2 trillion — the middle ground of what President Barack Obama wants and what Republicans say they could stomach.

That $ 1.2 trillion over a long period, maybe a decade or two, because there is no way they hike taxes on just the rich to get that much in a year. It’s thus going to be fucking peanuts in the grand scheme of things, because they are spending roughly the same amount every year over and above what they collect. If we say that the $ 1.2 trillion is over a decade, then doing the math, we are looking at about $12 trillion of money we don’t have over a decade, means we end up with $10.8 trillion in new debt after this new tax offsets the spending. We are fucked because these new taxes do nothing of any real consequence.

So what’s left? Well the vaunted cuts. The problem is that the donkeys, now that they have gotten their taxes, do not really want the cuts. Oh, don’t get me wrong, the LSM is going out of its way to pretend they do. Check this nonsense out:

A top Democratic official said talks have stalled on this question since Obama and congressional leaders had their friendly-looking post-election session at the White House. “Republicans want the president to own the whole offer upfront, on both the entitlement and the revenue side, and that’s not going to happen because the president is not going to negotiate with himself,” the official said. “There’s a standoff, and the staff hasn’t gotten anywhere. Rob Nabors [the White House negotiator], has been saying: ‘This is what we want on revenues on the down payment. What’s you guys’ ask on the entitlement side?’ And they keep looking back at us and saying: ‘We want you to come up with that and pitch us.’ That’s not going to happen.”

We want to cut entitlements. But by how much? Lets look at the Politico article for some perspective:

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told “Morning Joe” on Tuesday that he could see $400 billion in entitlement cuts. That’s the floor, according to Democratic aides, and it could go higher in the final give and take. The vast majority of the savings, and perhaps all of it, will come from Medicare, through a combination of means-testing, raising the retirement age and other “efficiencies” to be named later. It is possible Social Security gets tossed into the mix, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) plans to fight that, if he has to yield on other spending fronts.

Hmm. $400 billion cut? Is that in annual spending, or is that $400 billion over a decade? Because if it is $400 billion over a decade, it is chump change. And while it will not bridge the annual gap – that $1.2 trillion of money we don’t have being spent each year – $400 billion is a lot. That’s $4 billion over a decade. The problem is that even when combined with the $1.2 trillion hike, we are looking at a total of $5.2 trillion over the decade. But then that still falls horribly short. At our current spending rate, we will have $12 trillion of added debt. While $5.2 trillion is no chump change, we still would be left with $6.8 trillion in new debt. And that’s assuming that the $400 billion number is annual, which I doubt is the case.

The problem isn’t that a total $400 billion cut is insignificant, or that even if it really is a $4 trillion cut over the decade that it isn’t enough, it is that this cut thing is a total shell game. Dig down through this puff piece and eventually you find this:

Democrats want most Medicare and other entitlement savings to kick in between 10 and 20 years from now, which will make some Republicans choke. Democrats will point to the precedent set by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) of pushing most mandatory savings off until a decade from now.

We have to wait 10 to 20 years for the cuts? Seriously? Can we just say they want NO CUTS, because if the cuts happen 10 years out, as I already showed, we will be another $10 trillion in debt (assuming the tax increases happen). And if they come 20 years later that debt figure doubles. The cuts happening so far out that we can just accept it as fiat that they would never happen, is not acceptable. It’s not even an accounting gimmick. It is a bald faced bullshit lie. And even if off topic, I want to point out that I do not recall the Ryan plan pushing the cuts out like Politico claims, but I could be wrong. Yeah CM, that your token distraction item. You can focus on this tid-bit and ignore the rest of this story.

It sure is a given that these spending cuts, if they ever happens, still fall far short of what we need. And this assumes that these marxists don’t get to do what they really want – the reason they are doing the whole Kabuki dance about taxing the rich more for – which is to use the tax hike as an excuse to increase the entitlement spending they rely on to buy votes. More debt. We have also not even factored in debt increases due to Obamacare’s costs. The taxes & penalties that this behemoth levies are significant and economy crushing, but they will never cover the cost. Anyone telling you otherwise is a god damned liar. Even more debt. So we are still looking at an enormous jump in debt over the next decade if these crooks get their way. Huge jump. At least $10 trillion, in the best case scenario. Probably more.

Look, let’s not kid ourselves. If the cuts are not immediate and significant, they are never going to happen. This plan, if it doesn’t implement immediate cuts, is a sham. The American people are being had. Well, at least those of us that are productive tax payers doing the right thing are being bent over and had. The free loaders are gonna keep their gravy train and vote accordingly. At least until the gravy train derails. We are doomed. Nobody wants to deal with reality. We have to cut back spending or we are going to end up with an economic implosion that will wipe out practically all prosperity, growth, and advancement of the last century. Shame on the crooks willfully doing this to us. We are already over the fiscal cliff, and not bright enough to admit it.

I guess that since our lord and savior won the election, we better get used to pure propaganda stories about how awesome things are getting like this one.

CNN reports that practically all Americans went shopping over “Black Friday” weekend.

“A record 247 million shoppers visited stores and websites in the post-Thanksgiving Black Friday weekend this year, up 9% from 226 million last year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation released Sunday,” the CNN reports reads. The headline reads: “247 million shoppers visited stores and websites Black Friday weekend.”

I guess I am either not an adult – I did zero shopping – or that number was pulled straight out of their asses. Have no doubt that this stuff is part and parcel of the propaganda campaign that is supposed to convince people that the abysmal economy has made a turn for the better because “The One” was reelected. The facts speak differently. Our government is spending far more than any economy could ever support, and the left refuses to admit that.

The narrative is why we are getting so much hot air about how republicans MUST give in to tax increases on the evil rich. As I pointed out in other posts, the amount of money that these rate hikes on the evil rich will produce are going to be of no consequence. There is a reason that the media keeps reporting the revenue that this roll back would produce over a 10 year span instead: you have to multiply it by 10 to even come close to matching the number we suppose they are currently over spending by each year. When you understand that our government is spending at least $ 1.2 trillion more than they collect -and without a real budget for the last 4 years, they could be spending twice that for all we know – and have plans to jack that spending up, this fight to stick it to the rich comes into perspective: it is a political stunt.

The reason the left is hell bent on pushing for this hike is simple: they believe that the propagandists in the LSM will spin it in their favor, and they can’t lose. The fact that the revenue it will raise is not going to matter much be damned. Look, what you as one of the people they want to dupe need to know is the following: if they propose to jack up spending by 10% then provide this massive “fiscal cliff” kabuki dance in which they cover 1% of that spending, it is not a good deal. Even worse is the fact that the left is pretending that since they are implying they will give us a 4 to 1 ratio of spending cuts to new revenue, that things will balance out. Even if we where lucky enough to get that cutting – and my bet is that it will basically all come out of defense if the left gets its way – we will still have increased deficit spending of 5%. We lose, they win.

So I’ve been hearing rumbles of a walkout at Walmart stores on Black Friday. How’d that work out?

“The protest organizers have declined to say how many Wal- Mart associates they expect to be involved in the latest round of actions” says Bloomberg, and while the OurWalmart homepage feed contains lots of pictures of protest groups, there don’t seem to be a lot of actual Walmart employees. In fact, several rather wisful items champion single employees who have walked out of scattered stores. The company estimates that fewer than 50 actual Walmart employees participated, and though of course they have an incentive to undercount, OurWalmart has not given any particular reason to disbelieve them.

I’ve been going through the newswire and keeping seeing this report confirmed over and over again. A few hundred protesters — maybe a handful of actual Walmart employees. Almost all of them are UFCW stooges sent out there to protest and try to unionize Walmart’s 1.4 million employees.

The OurWalmart crowd is hoping this is the first stone in what will become an avalanche. I really don’t see it. Walmart pays decent wages ($8.50-$12 an hour) and hires people who typically have trouble finding good jobs. Every time they open a store, applicants line up to take jobs there. The union crowd and their supporters are simply butting their heads against a stark reality: that vast majority of people do not see Walmart as a bad place to work. I’m sure it seems bad if you’re a student who thinks he’s going to walk into a $100,000 a year deskjob or a you’re a union organizer making six figures. But there are tens of millions of Americans who would jello wrestle a bear for a job right now. And there are worse things in this world than working for Walmart.

I expect we have not heard the last of this. And I expect it will continue to meet with failure.

I did some contract work with IBC when it was based in Kansas City a few years ago. Around 2008-ish. Back then, the Teamsters Union was doing its best to bring about the outcome that the Baker’s Union ultimately accomplished: Death of the business. The End didn’t come since the Teamsters knew back then–as they did now–when to pull back from the brink. “Save the Twinkies, Save the World” was the vision.

Every day, I’d read the company’s consumer/employee bulletin board and just marvel at how divisive and completely un-moderated it was a website with a forum that some guy had set up for IBC employees to bitch about everything and I’m amazed that Hostess allowed it to exist. The CEO was constantly cursed by the union employees while everyone else damned the unions for demanding them all right out of jobs.

Nothing has changed, except that the inevitable has finally occurred. Hostess has been a doomed business for a long time. I’m not entirely sure who should be blamed (even though the proximate cause was the stubborness of the bakers). The vitriol, threats, and “I told you so’s” at the link don’t tell the story, but they clearly show that there’s no shortage of blame in any direction. It’s hard to see how any company can function for long with that much greed, suspicion, and ineptitude flying around.

I’m a stridently anti-union guy so it’s pretty obvious to me that the unions are to blame for the Hostess fiasco. They tried to turn a company that makes baked goods into more and more of a benefits and pension provider even as the company went bankrupt and had nothing left to give. You can’t be surprised by that kind of behavior. It’s just what they do. I pity the newly-unemployed workers, but I applaud the permanent destruction of thousands of union jobs. A more responsible business will take over the brand in time and all will be well, I’m sure.

Yet there’s a lesson here for us all. Like Hostess, the United States has also awarded lavish entitlements to its people and run up unsustainable liabilities in the process. The bakers-as-takers simply refused to accept the hard realities of the business and arithmetic, gambled their livelihoods on money that just wasn’t there, and lost everything for themselves and the 2/3 of employees who weren’t on board.

Our big national Twinkie is similarly going stale as people demand yet more cream filling from it. In Hostess’s case, the people who were tired of fighting about it with those who always wanted to squeeze out more simply walked away and let it go. What do we do as a nation when the capitalists just stop giving a fuck?

U.S. debt has shrunk to a six-year low relative to the size of the economy as homeowners, cities and companies cut borrowing, undermining rating companies’ downgrading of the nation’s credit rating.

Total indebtedness including that of federal and state governments and consumers has fallen to 3.29 times gross domestic product, the least since 2006, from a peak of 3.59 four years ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Private- sector borrowing is down by $4 trillion to $40.2 trillion.

So how can this be with trillion dollar deficits? Well, the private sector and non-federal public sectors are unravelling a tremendous debt bubble that built up in the last decade. Consumer debt is down by $1.3 trillion. Short term corporate debt is down by 55% as well. This isn’t as good as corporations need to borrow to grow. But for that much debt to be unravelled without a complete economic catastrofuck or massive inflation is remarkable.

It’s also helping with the national debt. Because consumer debt is so far down, the treasury has the loan market pretty much to itself. So all our borrowing is coming at low prices, despite the S&P downgrade.

I expect things to change soon. With debt down to much more manageable levels, people will start borrowing again. And if we can get control of federal finances, that will make borrowing even cheaper for private interests. Four years ago, I said that our economy would not move until we’d unravelled the tremendous debt we’d built up. We’re on our way to doing that, thankfully.

You know why I get irritated when people call Obama a Secret Communist Anti-Colonialist Crypto-Marxist Douchbag? Because if he actually were one, it would almost be preferable. At the very least, we wouldn’t have shit like this:

Richard Eggers doesn’t look like a mastermind of financial crime.

The former farm boy speaks deliberately, can’t remember the last time he got a speeding ticket, and favors suspenders, horn-rimmed glasses and plaid shirts. But the 68-year-old Vietnam veteran is still too risky for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, which fired him on July 12 from his $29,795-a-year job as a customer service representative.

Egger’s crime? Putting a cardboard cutout of a dime in a washing machine in Carlisle on Feb. 2, 1963.

Now before you start bank bashing … and I’ll bash some banks later on, let’s go into exactly why Wells Fargo fired him for having done a stupid stunt before men landed on the moon. It’s not because they are an evil company.

Big banks have been firing low-level employees like Eggers since the issuance of new federal banking employment guidelines in May 2011 and new mortgage employment guidelines in February.

The tougher standards are meant to weed out executives and mid-level bank employees guilty of transactional crimes, like identity fraud or mortgage fraud, but they are being applied across-the-board thanks to $1-million-a day fines for noncompliance.

Banks have fired thousands of workers nationally because of the rules, said Natasha Buchanan, an attorney with Higbee & Associates in Santa Ana, Calif., who has helped some of the banking workers regain their eligibility to be employed.

“Banks are afraid of the FDIC and the penalties they could face,” Buchanan said.

The regulatory rules forbid the employment of anyone convicted of a crime involving dishonesty, breach of trust or money laundering. Before the guidelines were changed, banks widely interpreted the rules to exclude minor traffic offenses and some other misdemeanor arrests.

New rules have eliminated exceptions for expunged crimes and certain minor offenses and expanded the categories of employees covered, Buchanan said.

Of course, the bank executives — you remember those guys? — the ones who turned the financial system into a cat’s cradle made out of uncooked spaghetti and then came to us with their hands out when it fell apart? Yeah, this not sweeping them up. In fact, Wells Fargo agreed to pay the Feds $175 million to make a high-level investigation go away.

There’s a waiver process for people who have mended their ways — like Eggers, who has not put a fake coin in a laundry machine recently. But the process takes time … unless you’re a high-powered executive. And the banks are prioritizing getting those waivers for … high-powered executives. The FDIC may issue a grand total of 74 waivers this year. They are not going to people like Eggers.

This is not communism. It’s not capitalism either. It’s the Corporate Welfare State, where profits are privatized, losses are socialized, risks are encouraged and the wealthy well-connected bosses are never harmed. When the hammer does come down, for appearance’s sake, it comes on low-level employees and borrowers, not the big bosses or even the medium ones. And both parties are supporting this, as much as the GOP likes to pretend they opposed TARP.

Now about those banks. This is yet one more data point for the case that the big banks have gotten too big and too powerful for the health of our nation and our economy. This is not a case where the free market has created a oligarchic banking system. This is a case where the government, by bailing out big banks and letting them use that money to buy up small banks, has encouraged this; has created this. I have made this argument before. But this is again in the news with Simon Johnson making the case that breaking up the big banks should be part of the GOP platform (if necessary, they can make room by dropping the planks on Shariah law and outlawing abortion without exception). Here is John Carney, quoting the TARP watchdog on the problem. I’ll quote Johnson:

The big opportunity for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and for conservatives more broadly is to choose this moment to pivot against big banks. Ryan is plugged into the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, which has been consistently opposed to megabanks and the subsidies they attract through being too-big-to-fail (talk to Representative Ron Paul).

Ryan can draw on the intellectual support of senior figures in the Republican Party — including former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, the presidential candidate who had the strong support of the Wall Street Journal editorial page for his approach to breaking up the megabanks. Senator Richard Shelby — ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee — is cagier, but seems inclined to be skeptical of the value of the largest banks as currently constituted. Two weeks ago, Senator David Vitter co-wrote a brilliant letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke on the problems the banks pose.

In addition to politicians, the emerging consensus among heavyweight Republican intellectuals is that bigger banks should be forced to fund themselves with much more equity relative to debt — in other words, capital requirements should be significantly higher for any financial firm whose failure can cause broad damage. The argument is that too-big-to-fail is too- big-to-exist and the right way to pressure banks to break up is through capital requirements that increase along with a bank’s size.

A Romney-Ryan ticket has the opportunity to tap the Republican populist tradition (think Teddy Roosevelt). The megabanks — such as Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Citigroup Inc. — have become today’s government-sponsored enterprises. They receive large, opaque and dangerous subsidies, encouraging them to engage in excessive risk taking. The question is how best to remove those subsidies.

Removing the subsidies isn’t enough. The damage to our political, financial and legal systems is too extensive. I do like the requirement of higher capital requirements, which has some support. But I fear that if we don’t do something about this soon, we’re going to have a much worse situation on our hands.

With the Dow Jones Industrial Average moving past 13,000 toward pre-financial-crisis highs, the conventional wisdom is that the stock markets expect a robust economy soon — just what President Obama needs to guarantee his re-election this fall.

Not so fast.

Yes, the economy may be improving after its anemic growth in 2011, which is better than a double-dip recession for a president seeking a second term. Stock prices — traditionally a good indicator of future growth — have been rising.

But much stock market “strength” appears to have less to do with a firm investor consensus that the economy is about to take off and more to do with technicalities.

For starters, returns on bonds are rock bottom, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s policy of keeping interest rates near zero. That forces many professional traders to bid up stocks.

Plus, while the pros these days cruise in and out of the markets at lightning speed and with no purpose other than to make a quick buck, the average investors who’ve traditionally used the markets to save and invest for retirement seem to have come to a far different conclusion about the markets’ prospects.

Main Street is ignoring the market’s rapid rise, no matter how much money the pros are making. Rather than investing in the much-hyped Obama recovery, small investors are giving it a big, fat thumbs down.

I keep getting told by the LSM and leftists that things are getting much better and full recovery is right around the block. Then we discuss jobs and growth, and they all admit that when you look at the real numbers, not the crap they peddle, things are bleak, if not downright messed up, and will remain so for a long time. These two things completely contradict each other and the narrative that the economy is soon to start flying again.

We keep getting told by the LSM that unemployment is dropping! That’s a sure sign things are getting better, right? Not so fast. If the occupier at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave had a (R) by his name, do you doubt that the LSM would be pointing out that drop is primarily caused because so many people no longer can get unemployment and have been dropped off the ledger? What about the fact that when you do statistical comparisons you see that we have one of the largest number of unemployed and under employed in the past century? Let’s not forget the massive swelling of the ranks of people on the dole in the last 3 years. The LSM and the left would love for you to think it is all someone else’s fault, and that what the retarded collectivists that have been making decisions in the last 3+ years have done has no impact, but you have to be a moron or a progressive – same thing I know – to fall for that nonsense.

If the average investor doesn’t think Obama is producing economic recovery, then the president may be in ever bigger trouble come November than his low approval ratings suggest.

That’s exactly why we are getting bombarded by the LSM with bullshit about everything but the current economic conditions and the actual actions of the people that have been running the country for the last 3+ years, unless they can also blame someone else for things going bad. The American public however is catching on, and even the most hard core leftists knows these clowns have been an epic fail, even if they are not admitting that, and that’s going to hopefully make sure that we get a real change and finally some hope come November.

If you want to know why I have some shred of sympathy for OWS despite some of their repugnant behavior (that Kos link is priceless, BTW), here is the reason:

Liberal protesters “occupying” Wall Street hate the big banks, which they see as the engine of capitalism. But conservatives ought to hate the big banks because they are the enemies of capitalism.

In addition to the Fannie/Freddie conforming loan increase I blogged about below, Bank of America moved $55 trillion in derivatives to an arm that is backed by the FDIC. We, the taxpayer, are now on the hook for their speculative bullshit. I’m no fan of Glass-Steagle but … Jesus, can’t we do something about that?

But it gets even worse:

A Government Accountability Office report highlighted plenty of conflicts of interest at the Federal Reserve. New York Fed official Stephen Friedman was on the board of Goldman Sachs and actively buying up shares of Goldman while the Fed moved to give Goldman special access to its lending windows.

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon sat on the New York Fed’s board while the Fed was pouring billions of bailout dollars into JP Morgan and granting JP Morgan special regulatory exceptions.

How is this not a crime? How is not corruption that so many in the regulatory agencies have now found six- and seven-figure jobs in the very industry they refused to crack down on? Maybe there is no technical law being violated. But can we not pass a law requiring public officials to stay out of industries they regulate for at least five years? Can we not at least shame these corrupt douchebags for their repellent behavior?

The banking industry is a bigger problem than ever, not withstanding the sack of shit called Dodd-Frank. As John Huntsman recently pointed out, the taxpayers’ exposure on the big banks has only increase since the crisis. The “too big to fail” banks control more of the industry than ever before, having used TARP mainly to buy other banks. And as Russ Roberts points out, we made sure that banks and their cronies got 100% of their money out of the financial crisis. Many avoided having to taking losses at all on the financial crisis they gleefully participated in and made tens of millions off.

Look at those links I just put up. Russ Roberts is anti-Keynesian free market economist. John Huntsman is a fiscally conservative Republican. Tim Carney is a libertarian. These are not dirty hippies saying “fight the power”. All three are free market believers who are saying what OWS is saying — enough is enough.

Now OWS and the Left are wrong on what do about the banks. Forgiving student loan debt would hurt the banks, but it massively unfair to people who paid for their own education. Forcing banks to write down mortgage principal is another bad idea that would either require a gigantic violation of contract law or, effectively, the government bailing out the banks again on their bad mortgage debt. Maybe Matt Yglesias is right that we need to change the way banks account for their gains and losses, but that’s a long-term fix.

Break the big banks up. “Too big too fail” is too big to exist. The right time to do this was when they came begging to us for TARP. But we can’t afford for another financial bubble to blow up in our faces. This time, it will be even worse. This time, it may break the whole damned system.

I’d say this is one of those time when the free market has failed, but it’s not. It’s one of those times when the unfree market has failed. TARP and regulatory capture created these monster banks from corruption and influence-peddling. It’s time we turned the clock back on that.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union believes it has the right to work at the facility, but the company has hired a contractor that’s staffing a workforce of other union laborers.

Get that? They have the “RIGHT” to do the work, but the employer has no business, let alone the right, to hire whomever they want within what the law allows, even if those other people are also unionized! In case you think the Longshoremen union has a right as they claim and the employer is in the wrong, let me point out the following little details that put things into perspective:

The blockade appeared to defy a federal restraining order issued last week against the union after it was accused of assaults and death threats.

This isn’t something that came out of the blue. This is likely the end game of something that has been going on for years, and that the union lost since it is obvious that the feds basically have told the union they are wrong and should back off. Yeah, the same feds that told Boeing they could not relocate work to their new plant in NC, where thousands of jobs would be crated, because the unions in Washington feared much of the work would be moved there to avoid dealing with the hassle and pain they cause, told the unions they have no case and to back off. A lot of good that warning did them though. After all, we still have unionized workers doing the work. I suspect the reason the Longshoremen union didn’t care about the warning from the feds is because, as the article points out, there have been no repercussions for both destruction of property and hostage taking, and there very likely will not be any either. It’s not as if their bought & paid for govenment stooges will actually take action against them. Get real.

Shit, these guys have no compunction of being violent when it affects other unionized workers! Anyway, will the LSM be telling this story? Accusing these people of engaging in terrorism against an employer whose crime is to have picked other union to do the work, of all things? Heh, just asking to make the point. We know the answer. Maybe this is some of that “war” Hoffa told us was coming the other day? Sure sounds like blue on blue action there, with other people, likely the tax payers, again picking up the tab.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 512.76 points, or 4.31 percent, to close at 11,383.68, led by Alcoa [AA 12.94 -1.32 (-9.26%) ] and BofA [BAC 8.83 -0.71 (-7.44%) ]. The last time the Dow dropped more than 500 points in a single session was in Dec. 2008.

I am sure it wasn’t the fault of either democrats, Obama, or the fact that our government has borrowed another $2.4 trillion it will squander in 18 months, with no significant changes to the ridiculously high level of spending set to actually be implemented. If only they had raised taxes! Heh, yeah sure. That would have helped a ton. Bet it would have been worse then.

UPDATE: Another $2.4 trillion deeper in debt, and fucked anyway. Hopefully this will be the end of Keynesian economics. Not holding my breath.